Almost everything that we do in chip design and verification was invented to raise the abstraction above schematics and polygons. Register-transfer-level (RTL) design, functional simulation, logic synthesis, floorplanning, and more fall into this category. Even the notion of binary circuits is an abstraction. Underneath… Read More
Driven by the need to rapidly move data across a chip, the NoC IP is already a very common structure for moving data with an SoC. And various implementations of the NoC IP are available in the market depending on the end system requirements. Over the last few years, the RISC-V architecture and the TileLink interface specification … Read More
The extremely popular RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) originally came from the Berkeley Architecture Research (BAR) group. BAR also developed several other key pieces of enabling technology that have helped RISC-V become so popular. Among these are Rocket Chip which serves as a RISC-V based SOC generator. It can … Read More
When we talk about open source, free usually comes in the context of “freedom”, not as in “free beer”, and open IP often serves as a base layer of value add for commercialization. The creators of the RISC-V instruction set, now working at startup SiFive, have released specifications for their aptly-named Freedom processor IP cores… Read More
